Cognizant

The company began its software development and maintenance business in early 1994, initially as an in-house technology development center for The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation and its operating units. Francisco D’Souza joined as a co-founder in 1994; he had previously worked at Dun & Bradstreet as a Management Associate and was part of the team that established the technology center.⁠[1][2][3][3]

In the same year, Lakshmi Narayanan, who had been a regional head of Tata Consultancy ServicesTata Consultancy ServicesTata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an information technology services company headquartered in Mumbai, India. Founded in 1968 and part of the Tata group, it listed on Indian stock exchanges in 2004; in fiscal 2026 it had revenues of more than $30 billion and 584,519 employees, and it is one of India’s major information technology services companies.Open the full entry from 1975 to 1994, joined the company’s Indian subsidiary as chief technology officer, and became president of that subsidiary on January 1, 1996.⁠[3][3]

In November 1996, the company, together with businesses including Erisco, IMS International and Nielsen Media Research and a majority interest in Gartner Group, was spun off from Dun & Bradstreet to form Cognizant Corporation, which became the company’s controlling parent. In 1997, the company bought the 24% minority interest in its Indian subsidiary from a third party for $3.4 million, making it wholly owned.⁠[1][1][1]

On June 19, 1998, the company completed its initial public offering of 2,917,000 shares of Class A common stock (3,354,550 shares including the over-allotment), of which 2.5 million were offered by the company and 417,000 by its parent, Cognizant Corporation. Cognizant Corporation completed a reorganization on July 1 of that year, and the shares it had held in the company passed to IMS Health; in July 1998, all rights to the “Cognizant” name and related marks were also transferred to the company.⁠[1][1][1][4]

As of December 31, 1998, IMS Health owned about 61.7% of the company’s stock and about 94.2% of its voting power. The number of customers the company served grew from 27 in 1997 to 40 in 1998, including ACNielsen, IMS Health, Dun & Bradstreet, First Data and Northwest Airlines.⁠[1][1][1]

On January 1, 1999, the company moved its principal executive office from 1700 Broadway in New York City to Glenpointe Centre West in Teaneck, New Jersey. At the time Wijeyaraj Mahadeva was chairman and chief executive officer and Gordon Coburn was chief financial officer; the company had software development facilities in Chennai, Calcutta and Pune in India.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

As of December 31, 2002, IMS Health still owned 55.3% of the company’s stock (all of its Class B shares) and 92.5% of the voting power. On February 13, 2003, IMS Health distributed all of its Class B shares to its own stockholders through an exchange offer; under the company’s charter, the Class B shares automatically converted into Class A shares on February 21.⁠[4][4][4]

Narayanan was the company’s president from March 1998 to December 2006 and also chief executive officer from December 2003 to December 2006, becoming vice chairman of the board on January 1, 2007. During this period total revenues grew from $229 million in 2002 to $1.424 billion in 2006, with 2006 net income of $233 million; by the end of 2006 the company employed more than 38,800 IT professionals and support staff worldwide.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

On January 1, 2007, Francisco D’Souza became the company’s president and chief executive officer. He had been a product manager at Pilot Software from February to December 1995, worked as a consultant to the company from January 1996, led North American operations and business development from June 1997, and served as chief operating officer from December 2003 to December 2006; he holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Macau and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.⁠[3][3][3][3][2]

From 2009 to 2013, the company’s revenues grew from $3.28 billion to $8.84 billion. At the end of 2013 it had about 171,400 employees, including about 133,000 in the Asia Pacific region, about 31,500 in North and Latin America and about 6,900 in Europe.⁠[5][5][5]

On September 14, 2014, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company signed an agreement with TZ Holdings, owned by private equity funds, to buy the parent of healthcare IT software company TriZetto entirely in cash, based on an enterprise value of $2.7 billion. The deal closed on November 20, 2014, at a purchase price of about $2.0 billion, funded in part by a $1.0 billion unsecured term loan signed the same day with JPMorgan ChaseJPMorgan Chase & Co.JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a financial holding company headquartered in New York that operates investment banking, consumer and small business financial services, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands; its roots trace back to the Manhattan Company of 1799.Open the full entry Bank as agent.⁠[6][6][7][7][7]

The company said it bought TriZetto to combine its healthcare software platforms with the company’s services into end-to-end platform-based solutions, and to cross-sell business process, infrastructure management and consulting services to TriZetto’s clients. In 2014, the company’s healthcare segment had revenues of $2.69 billion, about 26.2% of total revenues.⁠[8][8][8][8]

On January 15, 2015, Syntel sued TriZetto and Cognizant in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging breach of contract, tortious interference and misappropriation of trade secrets, stemming from Cognizant’s hiring of some former Syntel employees; Cognizant and TriZetto countersued on March 23, alleging that Syntel misused TriZetto confidential information, breached its contract and misappropriated trade secrets, and later added claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and for copyright infringement.⁠[9][9][9][9]

On October 27, 2020, a jury found for Cognizant and awarded $855 million, including $570 million in punitive damages; on April 20, 2021, the court upheld $285 million in actual damages but reduced punitive damages to $285 million, cutting the total to $570 million. On May 25, 2023, the Second Circuit affirmed liability but vacated the $570 million award based on “avoided development costs” and remanded the case.⁠[9][9][9][9]

On remand, the district court awarded the Cognizant side about $15 million in attorney’s fees on March 13, 2024, and on October 23 granted a new trial on compensatory damages; on June 30, 2025, a jury awarded TriZetto and Cognizant $70 million in compensatory damages. On March 27, 2026, the court ruled on post-trial motions, raising the total award to about $298 million (including compensatory and punitive damages, prejudgment interest and attorney’s fees), and entered judgment on April 29; Syntel filed a notice of appeal on May 19, and Cognizant said it would not recognize any gain until it becomes realizable.⁠[9][9][9][10][10]

On September 27, 2016, president Gordon Coburn resigned, and the next day the board appointed Rajeev Mehta, chief executive of IT services, who had joined the company in 1997, as president. The company also announced that it was investigating, under the oversight of its audit committee, whether certain payments relating to facilities in India violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other laws, and that it had voluntarily notified the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission and was cooperating fully.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

Shareholders subsequently filed several derivative suits in New Jersey state court and federal court. The consolidated federal derivative action was dismissed with prejudice on September 27, 2022, and the Third Circuit affirmed on May 3, 2024; another derivative suit filed in 2021 reached an agreement in principle to settle on July 25, 2025, which the company expects to be immaterial.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

On February 8, 2017, the company signed a cooperation agreement with entities of activist investor Elliott, agreeing to add three new independent directors, two to be appointed before the 2017 annual meeting (one identified by each side) and one before the 2018 annual meeting; two incumbent directors would not stand for reelection at the 2017 meeting. In return, Elliott agreed to vote in line with the board’s recommendations at the 2017 annual meeting. In 2016, the company had revenues of $13.487 billion and net income of $1.553 billion.⁠[12][12][13][13][13][13][13]

On September 18, 2017, three former employees sued Cognizant in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that the company discriminated against them and similarly situated employees on the basis of race; a fourth plaintiff and claims of disparate treatment and disparate impact based on race and national origin were later added. On October 27, 2022, the court declined to certify hiring and termination classes, but certified a subclass of about 2,300 former employees terminated while on the “bench” (not allocated to an active project).⁠[9][9][9][9]

The first jury trial in June 2023 ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked; at a retrial beginning September 24, 2024, the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs on October 4, finding a pattern or practice of discrimination against non-South Asian and non-Indian employees in bench terminations. On December 5, 2025, the court awarded the plaintiffs $16 million in interim attorneys’ fees and costs and found that company policies had a disparate impact on these employees; the case moved to a second phase to determine individual liability and damages. Cognizant said class certification was improper, that it would continue to defend itself and appeal at the appropriate time, and it has recorded no accrual for the ultimate outcome.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

CTS India, the company’s principal Indian subsidiary, repurchased shares from non-Indian Cognizant entities in 2013 and 2016, valued at $523 million and $2.8 billion respectively; the 2016 transaction was approved by the High Court in Chennai and resulted in $135 million in Indian income taxes. In March 2018, the Indian Income Tax Department asserted that an additional 33 billion rupees (about $349 million at the June 30, 2026 exchange rate) was owed on the 2016 transaction; the company deposited 5 billion rupees, with the remainder secured by a lien on time deposits.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

The company’s appeals were rejected by the Commissioner of Income Tax (Appeals) in March 2022 and by the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in September 2023, after which it appealed to the High Court. On January 8, 2024, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the company must deposit 30 billion rupees to proceed with the appeal, to be returned with interest if it prevails; the company made the deposit that month, and the case is pending before the High Court. The company maintains that it has paid all applicable taxes and has recorded no reserve.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

On February 6, 2019, the company announced the appointment of Brian Humphries, chief executive of Vodafone Business, as chief executive officer and director, effective April 1; he had previously worked at Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, among others. D’Souza stepped down as CEO on that date, serving as executive vice chairman until June 30 and thereafter remaining vice chairman of the board; president Mehta also stepped down on April 1 and left on May 1. At the end of 2018, the company had about 194,700 employees in India.⁠[14][14][14][2][2][2]

On February 15, 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Cognizant had agreed to pay $25 million to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The SEC alleged that in 2014 a senior official of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu demanded a $2 million bribe from the construction firm building Cognizant’s 2.7 million square foot campus in Chennai, that company president Coburn and chief legal officer Steven E. Schwartz authorized the contractor to pay it and directed subordinates to conceal it with doctored change orders, and that the company authorized two further bribes totaling more than $1.6 million.⁠[15][15][15][15]

Without admitting or denying the allegations, the company agreed to pay about $19 million in disgorgement and prejudgment interest and a $6 million penalty; the Justice Department declined to prosecute the company in exchange for about $19.4 million in disgorgement (reduced by the amount paid to the SEC) and its continued cooperation. By the company’s account, the total paid to the Justice Department and the SEC was about $28 million. On the same day, the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey indicted Coburn and Schwartz for violating and conspiring to violate the FCPA, and the SEC filed civil charges against them.⁠[15][16][2][15]

On February 28, 2019, a Supreme Court of India interpretation of the India Defined Contribution Obligation broadened the contribution base, increasing contributions by the company and affected employees. Assuming retroactive application, the company accrued $117 million for prior periods in the first quarter of 2019; in the seven years since, the Indian government has not initiated proceedings for most of the amount, and the final figure remains uncertain.⁠[9][9][9]

On April 20, 2020, the company announced a Maze ransomware attack in which attackers gained unauthorized access to certain data and caused significant disruption to its business; the attack also compounded the company’s difficulties in moving employees to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company later said it had contained the attack and eradicated remnants of attacker activity, but that lost revenue and containment, investigation, remediation, legal and other costs might exceed its insurance limits.⁠[17][17][17][17][17]

On January 9, 2023, the board decided to replace Humphries and asked him to step down from the board; on January 12, Ravi Kumar Singisetti (Ravi Kumar S), who had spent 20 years at InfosysInfosysInfosys (Infosys Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India, founded in 1981 by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six others. Listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of $20.158 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 328,000 employees, and is one of India’s major information technology services companies.Open the full entry and was its president from January 2016 to October 2022, became chief executive officer and director. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Shivaji University and an MBA from Xavier Institute of Management in India; under his offer letter, his annual base salary is $1 million and his annual equity awards have a target value of $11.5 million.⁠[18][18][18][18][18][18]

On June 5, 2024, a company subsidiary signed an agreement to acquire Propulsion Holdings, the indirect parent of Belcan, for about $1.29 billion ($1.19 billion in cash plus 1,470,589 Class A shares); Belcan supplies engineering research and development services to the commercial aerospace, defense, space, marine and industrial sectors, and the deal closed in the third quarter of 2024. The company also acquired ServiceNow partner Thirdera that year. In 2025, Belcan contributed 2.6 percentage points of the company’s revenue growth.⁠[19][19][20][20][9]

The SEC’s civil case was paused while the Justice Department’s criminal case against Coburn and Schwartz proceeded. In April 2025, the Justice Department dropped the charges against both men; the SEC then restored its civil case and asked for a stay while the parties explored a resolution, and the case was ultimately dismissed by joint stipulation, approved by the court on July 16, 2025, with prejudice, the SEC citing “the exercise of its discretion and as a policy matter.”⁠[16][16][16][16][16]

In fiscal 2025 (ended December 31, 2025), the company had revenues of $21.108 billion, up 7.0% from the prior year, an operating margin of 16.1% and net income of $2.230 billion; it recorded a one-time, non-cash income tax expense of $390 million that year on the enactment of the U.S. One Big Beautiful Bill Act. At the end of 2025 it had about 351,600 employees, including 256,900 in India, 41,600 in North America, 14,600 in Continental Europe and 7,800 in the United Kingdom.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

On January 1, 2026, the company completed its acquisition of 3Cloud, a large independent Microsoft Azure services provider, for cash consideration of $733 million placed in escrow on December 31, 2025; on June 22 it acquired Astreya Partners, an AI-first IT managed services provider. In the second quarter of 2026, the company launched Project Leap to streamline operations and improve productivity through AI, recording $84 million in restructuring charges for the quarter; it ended the quarter with about 356,700 employees.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10]

In August 2026, the company notified customers that a data breach on April 21, 2026, may have exposed their personal information, while saying there was no evidence the information had been misused. The cybercrime group CoinbaseCartel claimed responsibility, and the exposed information reportedly included Social Security numbers. The company offered those affected 24 months of credit and CyberScan monitoring through IDX, insurance reimbursement of up to $1 million and identity theft recovery services, but did not disclose how many people were affected.⁠[21][21][22][22][21]

On July 8, 2026, the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Labor announced a major investigation into fraud and human trafficking in the H-1B visa and Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) systems. Inspector General Anthony P. D’Esposito said his team, working with the anti-fraud task force led by President Trump and Vice President Vance, had uncovered employers and labor brokers submitting fraudulent applications, exploiting foreign workers through coercive wage-kickback arrangements and undercutting American workers with below-wage labor.⁠[23][23][23]

On September 7, 2026, the company announced plans to hire 1,500 U.S. college graduates and to expand its new Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator roles to 15,000 people; it also joined RAISE US, a bipartisan workforce-transition coalition launched by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and others, with chief executive Ravi Kumar S on its advisory board, and raised its global Synapse skilling goal to training two million people by 2030. The company said it holds more than 15,000 Anthropic Claude certifications.⁠[24][24][24][24][24][24]

On September 8, 2026, Labor Department Inspector General D’Esposito announced on X that Cognizant’s Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) filings were suspended, saying his office was working with the White House anti-fraud task force and “following facts, fraud and finances”; he also announced the suspension of PERM filings by data software company Cloudera. He did not disclose the specific allegations against Cognizant, the number of applications affected or how long the suspension would last, and announced no criminal charges.⁠[25][25][26][26][26][27]

The suspension prevents the company from moving forward with new PERM applications during the investigation, but does not affect PERM approvals, green cards or H-1B visas already granted; the investigation covers both the PERM and H-1B programs and followed whistleblower complaints. On September 18, Inspector General D’Esposito said the Department had suspended visa applications from Cognizant and Cloudera pending the criminal investigation. The suspension came a day after the company announced the U.S. hiring plan above; Cognizant did not respond to several media requests for comment.⁠[27][27][28][29][26][28][30]

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee welcomed the move on X, noting that committee chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking member Dick Durbin had previously questioned Cognizant’s hiring practices. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, as of June 30, 2026, Cognizant had 3,510 approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2026, sixth in the country, compared with 9,413 in 2020.⁠[27][26][25]

On October 5, 2026, the company signed a new unsecured credit agreement with a bank syndicate led by JPMorgan Chase Bank as administrative agent, comprising a $550 million term loan and a $1.85 billion revolving credit facility maturing on October 3, 2031, used to repay its existing facilities; the company borrowed about $1.0 billion under the revolving facility that day.⁠[31][31][31][31]

On October 8, 2026, at a White House anti-fraud task force press conference, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, citing criminal investigations led by the Office of Inspector General, announced that he was suspending “some of the largest IT outsourcing firms in the world” — Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, WiproWiproWipro (Wipro Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India. It began in 1945 as the vegetable oil maker Western India Vegetable Products and was transformed into an IT company under Azim H. Premji; listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of about $10.5 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 240,000 employees.Open the full entry, HCL and Capgemini — from the Permanent Labor Certification program, and that Microsoft and Adobe were also being suspended due to multiple federal investigations; the Department would not accept or process any new or pending applications involving these companies.⁠[32][32][32][32]

Sonderling said that since 2009 these companies alone had requested almost three million foreign workers and received more than 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications, “hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers,” and said the action would shut down “the pipeline of systemic fraud” that had flooded the country with foreign labor at the expense of American workers. Vice President JD Vance said the H-1B program had become “rife with fraud” and that the suspension would last “as long as it needs to,” with the aim of getting the companies to change their behavior.⁠[32][32][33][32][34][32][32]

PERM is a prerequisite for most employment-based green card petitions, requiring employers to show that no qualified, willing and available U.S. workers exist for a job; the measure does not cancel existing H-1B visas. As of that day, prosecutors had brought no criminal charges in the labor investigation; Cognizant did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry.⁠[34][34][34][35][35]

Cognizant: Official website: https://www.cognizant.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Cognizant (opens in a new window)⁠[37]